Remembering

How can you remember something when you don’t even have any inkling of what it was, no awareness of something else?

Most of the time, our awareness is very limited to what we experience and have experienced.  We use these experiences to weave the tapestry of life we exist in. What if there are other threads, other colors, other materials that we are not aware of, that we could use?

This is where I stood.  I had stood in this place since I was in my early teens, for nearly 35 years.  I believed that my life was a miserable, suffering, dark thing. This limited the materials I had available to me to create the tapestry of my life. Why couldn’t I see anything else?

Trauma, either self-inflicted trauma or real trauma, it doesn’t matter. Trauma colors everything we see. If affects us deeply.  It may be that we did experience something traumatic, something really horrible, that happened. We also may have self-inflicted traumas that we aren’t perfectly clear on. 

Enter the concept of the CSO (Compassionate Self Observer)

F asked me who I had loved.  Who did I have a great relationship with when I was young?  I told him it was Pete, my maternal grandfather. F then asked me to describe him in words

I choose: Kind, Loving, Intelligent, Caring, …

Then F asks me who the opposite of Pete is, in my life.  This is the NSO (Negative Self Observer)

I tell him Jill (Name changed to protect the innocent). F asks me to describe her in words.

I choose: Mean, demeaning, angry, upset, belittling…

Then, F says to me that the CSO is actually who you are and the NSO is what you do to you.

BOOM!

Up to this point in time the memories of Pete were entangled with his death. He died alone in the assisted living facility late one night. We had all gone to visit him earlier that day but then we left because we had life to deal with. How was it that we were so busy with our own lives we couldn’t be there to be present with death? I remember thinking, we should stay because he might die tonight. He did.  He died alone. For thirty-some-odd years I couldn’t recall or remember any of the good times with Pete.  All I could see is how I had failed him and he died alone. At the moment when F told me that I was the CSO, that I was Pete, I was all of a sudden, able to start remembering the good times. Riding in his pickup, sitting on the front porch with him, the smell of oil and dirt that permeated his workshop.

A self-inflicted trauma had filtered my memory of Pete. I say “self-inflicted trauma” because it was that. Had I failed him? Had he died alone because of me? Had I caused his death? No, I hadn’t, I had simply heaped the responsibility of it on myself, add to that large portions of grief and loss, and I had a recipe for a self-inflicted trauma. When we change the way we look at the world, when we rub the years of accumulated sleep from our tired eyes, the remembering changes.

When the perceptions of our trauma’s start to shift and change, we also change, our view of the world changes.

Now I can guess you may be thinking WTF, you aren’t Pete, you and he are different people. While that is true, it’s also not true. It’s true because we both were different collections of cells acting in concert to create a human form. But what about when we look deeper? All the attributes I had ascribed to Pete were ones that I saw as a child and remembered somewhere deep inside myself. Wouldn’t I have tried or wanted to be like that? What if I can view my thoughts and actions as Pete would have? Instead of doing what I had always done.

I had simply forgotten, forgotten that he loved me, the kindness he showed me, the even temper he always had. In doing so, I had forgotten to love myself, to show myself kindness.

And what about the NSO, The Negative Self Observer? Was Jill really those things? Was she mean, angry and demeaning? Maybe, maybe not. It doesn’t really matter. What matters is that by ascribing those attributes to her, I had, in a  way, altered my perception of how she treated me.